Time Warp: 2009: “Popcorn O’Clock”

Our microwave oven has a button that says “potato.” We’ve had this thing for over three years and I just noticed it. Do people seriously nuke potatoes often enough that they need a dedicated button for it? Do they crave the taste of rubberized spud so badly that they gotta have it in a single button press?

There’s also a “popcorn” button which we started using a lot lately. My inner jerk wants to tell you that I use it to reheat cold tea, but we have recently bought a metric ton of Cub Scout microwaveable popcorn (…yo, shout out to the be-hankied little peeps of Blackhawk Area Council)…so, I taught my son how to cook his own popcorn.

microwave popcorn…modern day asbestos

Which is both frightening and good at the same time. Independence and all. And if we pass out unconscious one day, he and his sister won’t rabidly have to eat our faces off. Or something. Anyway. The microwave oven is wedged in a space high over the stovetop, so we haven’t had to deal previously with attempted recreations of Anakin’s dramatic dunk into the lava in Episode Three (in which his outer derma melts off his body like an overtoasted marshmallow) but the added height, which I’d also like to mention is wonderful for short people who microwave Really Hot Things–and by “wonderful,” I mean “really, really terrible”–requires my son to pull a stool around the counter and contort in a ninja-like fashion so he can swing open the door to put the popcorn bag in.

After he examines the instructions on the bag to make sure he gets the correct side up, he puts it in the microwave, and punches the popcorn button. At this point, he presses his face or other body parts against the glass until I yell at him that the gamma rays are changing his molecular structure so he’d better get the heck away from the machine while it’s going. I don’t know if this is true or not, but my mom used to have a microwave that you could open while it was still on. Which might explain a few things about my offspring.

So, while he’s waiting for the corn to start popping, our microwave cleverly points out that popcorn is cooking by displaying POPCORN on the screen that normally shows the time. Hence, the intermittent shout of “It’s POPCORN O’CLOCK!” in our household, for which my son is not entirely nor even half responsible.